The still greater controversy--distinct from the foregoing, although often confounded with it--relating to the Perception of a Material World, is the crowning instance of the weakness we are considering. Berkeley has been unceasingly stigmatised as holding that there is no material world, merely because he exposed a self-contradiction in the mode of viewing it, common to the vulgar and to philosophers, and suggested a mode of escaping the contradiction by an altered rendering of the facts. The case is very peculiar. The received and self-contradictory view is exceedingly simple and intelligible in its statement; it is well adapted, not merely for all the commoner purposes of life, but even for most scientific purposes. The supposition of an independent material world, and an independent mental world, created apart, and coming into mutual contact--the one the objects perceived, and the other the mind perceiving--expresses (or over-expresses) the division of the sciences into sciences of matter and sciences of mind; and the highest laws of the material world at least are in no respect falsified by it. On the other hand, any attempt to state the facts of the outer world on Berkeley's plan, or on any plan that avoids the self-contradiction, is most cumbrous and unmanageable. A smaller, but exactly parallel instance of the situation is familiar to us. The daily circuit of the sun around the earth, supposed to be fixed, so exactly answers all the common uses that, in spite of its being false, we adhere to it in the language of every-day life. It is a convenient misrepresentation, and deceives nobody. And such will, in all likelihood, be the usage regarding the external world, after the contradiction is admitted, and rectified by a metaphysical circumlocution. Speculators are still only trying their hand at an unobjectionable circumlocution; but we may almost be sure that nothing will ever supersede, for practical uses, the notion of the distinct worlds of Mind and Matter. If, after the Copernican demonstration of the true position of the sun, we still find it requisite to keep up the fiction of his daily course; much more, after the final accomplishment of the Berkeleyan revolution (to my mind inevitable), shall we retain the fiction of an independent external world: only, we shall then know how to fall back upon some mode of stating the case, without incurring the contradiction. * * * * *